Trembling With Fear 08/16/20

Mucus by Kevin M. Folliard

On Monday, reports began of mucus-covered mollusks slithering from Chicago sewers. They came in clumps and swarms, up storm drains, out of grates, and through the peephole openings of manhole covers. Some even began to surface in restrooms and kitchen sinks. 

The slugs had a pale off-white pigment, like a glow-in-the dark-sticker. But their slime trails were a bright lime-green, and in the sun, the mucus had a strange effect on everything it touched.

It soaked up photons, sizzled, and burned like otherworldly acid. The corrosive substance did not seem to affect the slugs themselves. Nothing did, in fact. Their bodies compressed paper-thin under even the most tremendous pressure. 

Joe Lugowski learned this the hard way when his semi-truck careened over a patch of slugs worming their way over I-55 at 10:20 a.m. The truck tires flattened them, and within seconds, they puffed back up, and slithered onward. The mucus on Joe’s tires, however, corroded the rubber, causing 8 simultaneous blowouts. The truck overturned across 4 lanes of traffic. The ensuing 40-car pileup killed 13 morning commuters and injured many more. 

The slippery, indestructible creatures wormed indifferently through the wreckage. The sun scorched their mucus paths into black striations in the road.

By Monday afternoon, the streets were cleared. Special Agent Regina Holiday and her crew landed on the Magnificent Mile via helicopter. They donned hazmat suits and descended into the sewer system to investigate the source of the infestation which had halted all traffic and brought the trains to a stop. 

The small team of investigators entered the tunnels at 1:45 p.m. 

They did not return. 

Agent Holiday’s transmissions were sporadic. At one point, she declared cryptically, “There’s a lot missing down here.” Later, she reported, “I can’t even begin to understand what I’m looking at.” 

Her team was not responding to the questions radioed down to them. 

Finally, at 2:23 p.m., Agent Holiday gave one final, frantic transmission: “There’s no end to this! It goes forever! I can’t—” Static. “Something is hungry . . . .”

People attempted to contain the slugs, using shovels, push brooms. Whatever they could find.

At nightfall, Garfield Jackson organized the city’s snowplow and salt truck drivers to patrol the neighborhoods and try to keep the slugs pushed away from homes. Though the salt had no effect on the creatures’ bodies, the plows did help corral the pulsating masses for a time. The corrosive mucus was not as potent without sunlight, but the sheer volume of the infestation was soon beyond containment.

The slugs poured with particular fury south of Fire Station E108. Firefighter Mike Knowles organized efforts to douse the area in gasoline, to start a controlled burn. Within minutes of the blaze, everyone within a three-block radius was dead. 

Many others attempted to set the slugs on fire as well, never realizing that the mucus, when burned, became a noxious asphyxiating poison. 

The slugs themselves did not burn.

By midnight, the slugs were oozing up in great liquid tubes of wormy muck, spilling into the streets and out of the plumbing. Filling homes and high-rises.

Seven-year-old Talia Habib screamed in terror when the green muck came slithering from their bathroom sink. Her father scooped her up and carried her from their home. They were two of the fortunate few who made it to a rescue chopper that night.

By Tuesday morning, a blanket of neon mucus coated the streets, clogged plumbing, filled foundations, and slicked over brickwork, bridges, and monuments. Waves of gushing indestructible invertebrates piled up over people and animals. They drowned the grass and coated the trees in bubbly globs.

At the break of dawn, Sherman the Lion unleashed one final, earth-shattering roar in the Lincoln Park Zoo as the slugs poured through the bars of his cage.

As the sun rose over the city, the mess of mucus sputtered and hissed. The streets cracked and split apart. Mighty skyscrapers crumbled from the bottom up. 

Rings of acid burned away the Loop, and hundreds of thousands of tons of rock, metal, glass, concrete, cars, trains, and people sank into a terrible darkness.

The gateway growing beneath the city expanded. The Lake Michigan shore sloshed into whitewater falls that spilled into unknown depths. The slugs, having done their job, glittered like glow-in-dark confetti back into the abyss. And the roar that escaped the crater could be felt across the oceans.

Far more terrifying creatures—ravenous things forgotten by time—lurked on the other side of the subterranean portal.